It’s really astonishing to read the perspicacity of Hillair Belloc regarding the centuries-old challenge to civilization posed by a single pre-Western tribe to the nations of the West in his landmark book, The Jews. Belloc not only predicted both the Holodomor and the Holocaust, but even observed that the latter would take the form of a violent large-scale reaction to Bolshevism in Russia, 20 years before the Wannsee Conference. Regardless of whether you are a clueless Christian Zionist, a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-semite, a wickedly subversive neoclown, or a proud Sabra, I would highly recommend reading Belloc’s book due to the way in which it lays out the repetitive past as very probable prelude.
Now these causes of friction permanently present tend to produce what I have called the tragic cycle: welcome of a Jewish colony, then ill-ease, followed by acute ill-ease, followed by persecution, exile and even massacre. This followed, naturally, by a reaction and the taking up of the process all over again.
In our own time we have seen, quite lately, the succession of the second to the first of these stages; we have passed from welcome to ill-ease. That passage threatens a further passage from the second to the third; from the third to the terrible conclusion.
We feel quite secure to-day from the last extreme of this cycle. We are certain it will never come to persecution: that is still inconceivable. But it is not inconceivable everywhere: and no society is free from change. Some now alive may live to see riots even in this quiet polity and worse in newer or less settled states.
Such a catastrophe is to be avoided by every effort in our power and a solution to the problem presented must imperatively be sought. But in passing we should note, for the consideration of those who may doubt the acuteness of the problem and the immediate practical necessity for a solution, the presence of a phenomenon which amply proves that it is acute and that the solution is necessary….
The real interest in the Jewish revolution in Russia, to which is now permanently affixed the name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more than the Russian for “whole-hogger”), lies in these two points: first, the continued propaganda of Communism throughout the world (which propaganda in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents); secondly, and much more important, the effect of the Jewish revolution in producing hostility to the Jews throughout the world… The other effect of the Jewish revolution in Russia—the peril into which it has put the Jews themselves—is permanent and is of the first magnitude.
Besides Thucycides’s famous chapter on civil war, there is no other historical work that reads as if it was written just last week instead of nearly a century ago. It is highly relevant today because the process of the tragic cycle that Belloc describes playing out in the continental European context has observably moved from the first to the second stage in the United States, and from the second to the third stage in the United Kingdom.
The important difference between then and now is that Israel now exists as a state as well as a nation, so for the first time in the history of Western civilization there exists a peaceful and civilized solution that does not involve Jews massacring a nation or a nation massacring Jews. Hazony notwithstanding, that is the real virtue of nationalism, and one which finally renders unnecessary the endless subversions and inversions of the Shapirus and Pragers of the world.